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Tuesday, 3 September 2013

FRINGE BENEFITS - A LOOK AT GRIMMFEST’S 2013 FRINGE

The Grimm Festival Programming Team has
always tried for a balance between the popular and the profane; striving always
to secure the films our audiences are keenest to see and are already talking
about, but also to seek out the lesser known films; the stuff that will have
them talking long after the festival is over. And this year is no exception.

Where we have changed things a little is in
the launching of what we are terming the GrimmFest Fringe, over at the Lass
O’Gowrie. This is essentially a development from what, in previous years, has
been termed the “breakout screen”: it is where we will be showing some of the
more left-field, challenging, independent films of the festival, alongside
shorts and other events. It’s the place to find overlooked and
under-appreciated cinematic gems, alongside some of our more controversial
content.

Thus, we kick off on Thursday with the UK
premiere of TO JENNIFER. This is the latest film from James Cullen Bressack,
whose previous, debut, feature, the deeply troubling “found footage” home
invasion shocker HATE CRIME was one of the talking points of last year’s festival, shaking
even our horror-hardened Grimmlins with its raw, visceral, confrontational
style. TO JENNIFER is a quieter film, its violence more emotional, and its
horrors more psychological. But it is no less troubling for all that. Shot
entirely on an iPhone, it sees Bressack continuing to experiment with the
possibilities of the “found footage” format, and the spurious sense of
“reality” it offers. The film is presented as the work of Joey, a geeky and
intense young man, who has begun to suspect that Jennifer, the love of his life, is cheating on him. He
decides to travel across country to meet her, enlisting a couple of friends to
make a film of his adventures, which he intends to present to her as evidence
of his commitment. Essentially a darkly funny road-trip movie, leading to a
final confrontation, TO JENNIFER is also an exercise in deception, owing as
much to “unreliable documentary” films such as CATFISH as it does to other
found footage horrors.

Staying with the
“found footage” format, Thursday also sees the UK premiere of HOUSE WITH 100
EYES, which chronicles the attempts of a suburban couple to create their latest
snuff film, complete with such “DVD” extras as “”Director’s Commentary” and
“Alternate Takes”. To this end. their house has been set up with cameras in
every room, recording everything. The film is presented as having been pieced
together from footage sent anonymously to a documentary filmmaker, thereby
providing answers to the two questions which always tend to undermine the
credibility of any Found Footage film, namely “Why are they filming this?” and
“If it is found footage, how come it’s been edited so carefully?” In the
process, of course, it does rather disqualify itself from being really
considered a found footage film at all. Not that it matters. Directors Jay Lee
and Jim Roof are more concerned with the process of filmmaking in general, and
in particular with the narcissism and self-delusion of the amateur movie-maker.
Dark and disturbing it may be, butHOUSE
WITH 100 EYES has a strong satiric undercurrent. Smarmy suburban snuff
enthusiastsEd and Susan are oddly
reminiscent of Paul and Mary Bland, the reluctant swinger protagonists of Paul
Bartel’s pitch-black comedy classic EATING RAOUL, andthe early scenes in which the couple are out
and about trying to lure people into their murder van drolly parody a certain
kind of leering gonzo porn. Veering between claustrophic tension, harrowing
scenes of torture and murder, and mordant, extremely cruel black comedy, this
is a film which continually challenges and disturbs the viewer’s expectations
and preconceptions. Which is surely what the best horror cinema is all about.

We’ve also more traditional, but no less
effective independent horror on Thursday with the premiere of HOME SWEET HOME.
This is the first film in English from David Morlet, the French director who
made the criminally-underrated MUTANTS a few years back. We’ve always been
partial to a good Home Invasion movie at Grimmfest, and this is a fine, and peculiarly unsettling, addition to
the genre. It has a careful, cold precision; taking its time with its set ups,
just as the clinical, home invading psycho takes his time in his actions, and
it looks beautiful; elegantly shot on Red, with a skillful use of framing,
camera movement, composition and space to ratchet up tension, in a manner that
John Carpenter and his HALLOWEEN DOP Dean Cundey would be proud of.

All this plus the
shorts: 60s monster movie fantasies come into collision with the horrors of the
real world in ATTACK OF THE BRAIN-SUCKER, a yuppie architect is unable to rid himself of
a one-night stand in THE GIRL AT THE DOOR, and as a
companion piece to the suburban snuff movie makers of HOUSE WITH 100 EYES,
we’ve young serial killers in love, in ANGST PISS AND SHIT

On Friday, we begin with one of our rare
documentary screenings, MY AMITYVILLE HORROR, a highly unsettling portrait of
Daniel Lutz, whose family were at the centre of the famous Amityville Haunting
which inspired so many books and films. Filmmaker Eric Walters takes the
obviously disturbed and damaged Lutz on a journey to try to determine what
exactly happened; bringing him into contact with various eccentric religious
types, para-psychologists, and pulp journalists, each offering their
interpretations, and all of them only confusing matters still further.
Demonstrating that there is more than one kind of haunting, and that some are
far more traumatic than others, this is a thought-provoking and profoundly
upsetting film, likely to provoke strong reactions in the viewer. Which is
precisely why we are screening it.

A film which has been provoking reactions
of an entirely different sort is the much- (and unfairly) maligned SMILEY. An
old-school teen-slashed, featuring a seemingly supernatural online killer and
spinning updated riffs on such genre classics as CANDYMAN and NIGHTMARE ON ELM
STREET, it brings the urban legend into the era of cyber-bullying. Continuing
with the same theme, but in a rather different vein, we have ANTISOCIAL, which
splices the body horrors of David Cronenberg’s seminal VIDEODROME with the
communication-paranoia of Bruce McDonald’s cult classic PONTYPOOL to create a
nasty New Year’s Eve parable about how excessive social media use is turning us
all into zombies. Literally. I’ve always hated people who mess with their
mobile phones during screenings. Looks like I was right to. They are putting
all of our lives in danger. Sure, it’s only a movie - but make sure you switch
your phones off while its playing. We won’t be answerable for the consequences
if you don’t.

All this, plus a striking, surreally
disturbing short from Israel, THE PLAN, and, in readiness for his Q&A in
the evening over at the Dancehouse, SFX, make-up and prosthetics legend SHAUNE
HARRISON will be hosting a special workshop, in which he will be demonstrating
techniques and transforming one lucky Grimmlin into one of the walking dead.

Saturday’s Fringe focuses on issues of
memory, be it a lack, or a superabundance thereof. We begin with a brace of
shorts. First up, OUT THERE, a tale of fragmented recollection and repressed
guilt in the middle of the apocalypse, which sees Randall Plunkett, the current
Lord Dunsany, no less, following on in his illustrious ancestor’s footsteps as
a master of the lyrically macabre. Then there’s SLEEPWORKING, which imagines a
future in which people have inplants in their head which enable them to work
while they sleep. Sounds like something we’re all dreaming of, doesn’t it? Not
really, no. Because the result is a Philip K. Dick style nightmare of colliding
memories and dreams, in which reality grows increasingly tenuous. And waking up
might be the worst shock of all.

This is certainly the case for the
protagonist of MODUS ANOMOLI, today’s feature film, receiving its English
premiere, who wakes up to find himself buried alive in the middle of a forest.
Digging himself free, he tries to piece together how he got there. The answer
is far more disturbing than he could ever suspect… An inventively twisted psychological thriller,
that continually challenges narrative expectation and character perception,
this is very different in tone to the previous Indonesian film to hit these
shores - the bone-crunching actioner, THE RAID. Indeed, in its preoccupation
with buried truths and buried memories, and with its unreadable, ambiguous
protagonist, it might almost seem to offer some allegorical statement about the
complex, troubled, and often troubling, history of its country of origin. It
might not offer the disturbing insights of the recent documentary THE ACT OF
KILLING, but it does seem to be saying something similar about the darker
reaches of the Indonesian psyche. At least, that’s my interpretation. Others
might just like to settle down and enjoy the most unpredictable amnesia
thriller since MEMENTO. Or whatever the last one was. I’m afraid I’ve
forgotten.

But I mustn’t forget to mention CHRISTOPHER
FOWLER. Best known nowadays for his inventively ghoulish short stories, and
genre-bounding novels, which straddle horror, fantasy, and crime fiction,Chris was also one of the founders of
influential media promotions company The Creative Partnership. You know that
film about the chest-bursting Aliens? Remember the poster strapline, “In Space
No-One Can Hear You Scream”? Well, that was one of his. Chris’s latest book,
FILM FREAK, is a memoir of that time, and he’ll be along to regale us with
tales of glamour and excess from his misspent youth, haunting the seedier of
London’s flea-pits in search of cinematic strangeness, and describing how his
early years as an obsessive cineaste led him to a career as a tyro film
promoter in Seventies Soho.It promises
to be an entertaining and enlightening show.

SUNDAY’s fringe presentation is a single
feature. But don’t worry, you’re not being shortchanged. We saved the most
disturbing, most extreme film till last. THANATOMORPHOSE (the title might be
roughly translated as “death transformation”) is the story ofan isolated and unsuccessful young
sculptress, trapped in a somewhat abusive relationship, who moves into a new
apartment, only to find that as her sense of isolation grows, her body begins
to rot.
The glib way to describe it would be as “Zombie Repulsion”, with the female lead’s mental decline here
symbolised by her physical decay. But this really does not do the film justice.
Certainly, it has the kind of claustrophobic, dingy apartment location,
oppressive atmosphere and dark surrealism of Polanksi’s film. But it also has
the flat, deliberate pacing and morbid, morose obsession with sex, death and
decay that characterised the films of 90s cult German underground director Jorg
Buttgereit (NEKROMANTIK, DER TODESKING), and takes the cinema of body horror to
a whole new level. Featuring truly horrifying special effects by Canada’s
infamous Remy Couture, the only make-up artist to have faced prosecution for on
trial for “moral corruption through propagation of obscene material,” it is the
most unsettling, upsetting, disturbing, and downright gruelling film any of us
has seen in a very long time. Pretty much guaranteed to generate controversy,
to be a major festival talking point, it is, in short, a cinematic ordeal, and
is not to be entered into lightly. Consider yourselves warned.

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GRIMM UP NORTH is Manchester's home of Horror, Sci-fi and Fantasy. We run monthly screenings, events and the annual film festival in October.
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Nightmarish narratives, retina-searing images and heart stopping shocks galore. Blood-soaked red carpet premieres, ghoulish guest appearances and much more! www.grimmfest.com